What's (are) the funniest/stupidest way(s) you've broken your linux setup?

Tinkering is all fun and games, until it’s 4 am, your vision is blurry, and thinking straight becomes a non-option, or perhaps you just get overly confident, type something and press enter before considering the consequences of the command you’re about to execute… And then all you have is a kernel panic and one thought bouncing in your head: “damn, what did I expect to happen?”.

Off the top of my head I remember 2 of those. Both happened a while ago, so I don’t remember all the details, unfortunately.

For the warmup, removing PAM. I was trying to convert my artix install to a regular arch without reinstalling everything. Should be kinda simple: change repos, install systemd, uninstall dinit and it’s units, profit. Yet after doing just that I was left with some PAM errors… So, I Rdd-ed libpam instead of just using –overwrite. Needless to say, I had to search for live usb yet again.

And the one at least I find quite funny. After about a year of using arch I was considering myself a confident enough user, and it so happened that I wanted to install smth that was packaged for debian. A reasonable person would, perhaps, write a pkgbuild that would unpack the .deb and install it’s contents properly along with all the necessary dependencies. But not me, I installed dpkg. The package refused to either work or install complaining that the version of glibc was incorrect… So, I installed glibc from Debian’s repos. After a few seconds my poor PC probably spent staring in disbelief at the sheer stupidity of the meatbag behind the keyboard, I was met with a reboot, a kernel panic, and a need to find another PC to flash an archiso to a flash drive ('cause ofc I didn’t have one at the time).

Anyways, what are your stories?

tigerjerusalem, (edited )

sudo apt upgrade -y

To this day I can’t figure out why it killed the GUI and all terminal commands on a Mint install…

Menteros,

I stay away from apt. apt-update for me has never messed like apt has.

Mayonnaise,

I’m relatively new to Mint, but I thought that sudo apt update just checked for updates and sudo apt upgrade -y was for actually installing the updates. I don’t see why that would break it though.

tigerjerusalem,

You’re right, I messed up - I always switch between the two, because “update” makes more sense in my head. I fixed the text.

KingThrillgore, (edited )
@KingThrillgore@lemmy.ml avatar

I had rEFInd and GRUB installed entirely by accident, and a botched update for Arch hosed my entire EFI setup making it impossible to boot Linux or Windows w/o a LiveCD. Thankfully it self repaired once I nuked rEFInd. I ended up going back to Ubuntu, but I hate snaps. I still would recommend Arch for most Linux users who want the power windows.

drathvedro,

Actually, I have a story that I’d consider an achievement even though it was extremely stupid and by all accounts should’ve bricked the system but didnt.

So I was on windows and wanted to install linux as a dual-boot on the main drive. The problem was that my mobo didnt like this particular and the only flash drive I’ve had, dropping it out mid-boot, before I got any usable terminal, so a usual install method wasn’t an option. So I had this crazy idea to start a vmware vm in windows and pass the linux iso and the boot drive directly to it and try to install it live over the running system. Unfortunately, vmware guys thought of this and there’s a check that disallows passing the boot drive to vms. So i created a bunch of .vmdks for another drive and fiddled with them in notepad until I somehow managed to trick vmware and at some point it started booting the same windows copy that I was sitting on. I quickly powered it off, added the linux iso and proceeded to install like I usually would. It did involve some partition shuffling, but, somehow, it went smoothly, linux installed, grub caught on, and even windows somehow survived, even though it was physically moved around on the disk. It serms that vmware later patched this out, because later in an attempt to re-create the trick of running the same copy of windows twice, but after updates to both windows and vmware, I was met with the same old error that boot drive is not allowed when trying to add that same virtual drive I had laying around.

JATtho,

I had a similar debacle, when I managed to corrupt a btrfs file system to point it wouldn’t mount again…

I was preparing it to have as my main system on bare hardware. I had accidentally mounted the same block device simultaneously in the host and guest: kablamo silent corruption and all 5 hours of progress lost.^*^ :(

*shred the guest VM, host was ok.

deafboy,
@deafboy@lemmy.world avatar

I had a similar setup once. Dualboot, plus the VM with the same physical disk, to access windows, while running linux.

All it took was a small distraction… I’ve missed the grub timeout, and accidentally booted the same ubuntu partition in a VM that was running on the real HW. To shreds…

fl42v,

Allrighty, now we officially need a program (I’m hesitant to call it malware since technically it’s for the user’s good XD) that covertly replaces a running copy of windows with linux… Besides, I think it was possible before to install stuff like Ubuntu directly from windows?

callyral,
@callyral@pawb.social avatar

and a need to find another PC to flash an archiso to a flash drive ('cause ofc I didn’t have one at the time).

you can do that from your phone using etchdroid

i don’t remember ever breaking my system in a terrible way, but when i started using linux (with linux mint) i uninstalled ca-certificates and i think that uninstalled the whole DE

haruajsuru, (edited )

I mistyped my SU password when setup the OS…

jwt,

Suicide Linux?

ulkesh,
@ulkesh@beehaw.org avatar

Renaming a mount point while mounted was a fun experience in losing data back in the big box Redhat 5.0 days.

Peffse,

Can’t say I have any interesting stories. Most of mine are just the head-scratching “I don’t know why that didn’t work; guess I need to reinstall” kind of story. Like enabling encrypted LVM on install and suddenly nothing is visible to UEFI. Or trying to switch desktop environments using tasksel and now I have a blank screen on next reboot. That lame kind of stuff.

My coworker though… he was mindlessly copy/pasting commands and did the classic rm -rf $UNSETVARIABLE while in / and nuked months of migrated data on his newly built system. He hadn’t even set up backups yet. Management was upset but lenient.

Swagdorf,

I wanted to move my Arch VM to bare metal, so I copied out all the important bits. Then I wanted to move that copy to a new drive so I could boot into it.

I THOUGHT I’d MV all the files in the Arch install’s etc directory using sudo MV /etc …

I also (somehow) mashed my install’s etc with Arch’s and bungled both, with no live CD to help.

I learned a thing or two about absolute file paths…

sfgifz,

This thread should be renamed to 101 reasons why business give Windows or Macs to their employees.

fl42v,

It’s not like you can’t shoot yourself in the foot while using windows (not sure about macs, tho, but likely just as well). I remember breaking windows countless times while figuring out what service crap can be disabled, removing edge or defender, yada yada.

On the contrary, in my experience, if you’re not actively messing with linux, it’s overall more stable than windows. Like I had to install windows on an actual machine a short while ago, and it was a clusterheck. Drivers failed to auto install (touchpad/trackpoint drivers, for Chaos’s sake), random bsod after an hour or so of normal use, etc. As for linux breaking on itself, I remember like 3 times that happened with me in my ~5 yrs of daily driving different distros, and 2 of those were fixable by switching to a tty (the 3rd didn’t boot, as far as I remember, due to some incompatibility between bedrock and arch).

iegod,

A system update broke a dependency for libre Sprite, which hasn’t had an update in like two years. You can say they should but let’s be real, my apps shouldn’t break with an update. One of my laptop needs was portable graphics creation. This broke one of my major use cases. Yay.

Adanisi,
@Adanisi@lemmy.zip avatar

Some Windows updates completely break the whole system. It’s not unique to Linux based systems.

Head,

I deleted the entire taskbar.

ArmainAP,

Somehow I found ways to remove and break the GUI multiple times in multiple ways in multiple distros.

Different scenarios, different times, different issues trying to “fix”. My usual fix after this was always to copy what I think I still had important and then move on with a reinstall.

Recently I have been playing with ZorinOS and broke it in the same way by fidgeting with pipewire. Distro hoped to Fedora Silverblue due to the immutable filesystem. I wonder if I will break this one in a way I cannot revert it easily with rpm-ostree. I almost feel challenged.

forvirretfugl,

Wanted a cool bootscreen on my Nixos machine - commented out the bootloader to troubleshoot, why my meme-boot-picture wouldn’t show - after rebooting, it loaded straight into the BIOS and finally realized what I had done… Was able to fix it thankfully

inetknght,

I was running Fedora. Something like 27 or so. I needed drivers. I don’t remember if it was AMD or Nvidia, but they were only available on RedHat.

So I downloaded the RedHat drivers for the GPU and forced it to install. It worked! It was great.

Then when I updated the distro to the next release… everything failed. It was dropping into grub, but no video was output. Ooof.

So I ended up enabling a terminal console and connecting to it via a serial port to debug. I had to completely uninstall that RPM and I was never happy that it was properly gone. So a few months later I ended up reinstalling the whole OS.

On the plus side, I learned a lot about grub and serial consoles. Worth it.

AlijahTheMediocre,

I somehow locked myself out of sudo when trying to give my user permission to read serial devices.

Had to reinstall.

drndramrndra,

The first time I installed Fedora after like a decade I updated to new minor version -> sudo reboot because I was already in the terminal -> reinstalled because it wouldn’t boot anymore

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